


and I'll never go home again

by seventhswan



Series: Personal Top Three [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Identity, POV Female Character, Post-Winter Soldier, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhswan/pseuds/seventhswan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>She floats to the parked car, the weak Washington sun sweet on her bared shoulders. One of the Natalias of the past knew a poem about spring – some of the lines whisper through her mind, trailing like smoke, shifting between Russian and English like a radio trying to hold on to a station through the static.</p>
</blockquote><p>Afterwards, Natasha does what she does best – she starts over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and I'll never go home again

**Author's Note:**

> Translations (according to Google): Ната is a diminutive of Natalia,  
> Коренастый – ‘dumpy/chunky’,  
> Чёрная – feminine singular form of ‘black’
> 
> I’d be very grateful for corrections from anyone with knowledge of Russian!
> 
> General notes: This would, I suppose, qualify as a slight AU in that it ignores the meeting in the cemetery, and Natasha takes off directly after her comments at the hearing. 
> 
> Title from Lorde’s **Buzzcut Season** , which is definitely the theme song for this.

When Natasha walks out of the hearing - the shouts, accusations, camera flashes just a foam of white noise at her back, trailing in her wake – she stops at the nearest trashcan, and throws away her shoes. She pauses, just for a second, then pitches in her jacket, as well. The quality of the noise pursuing her changes – it hesitates, fading away to a bumblebee buzz, wary. She hears the word _crazy_.

Perfect.

She floats to the parked car, the weak Washington sun sweet on her bared shoulders. One of the Natalias of the past knew a poem about spring – some of the lines whisper through her mind, trailing like smoke, shifting between Russian and English like a radio trying to hold on to a station through the static. 

She imagines turning on her heel and reciting the poem to the pursuant horde. She imagines bending her feet and dancing the spring program from her ballet class the year she was four, a routine she can still remember perfectly, right there on the sidewalk. It makes her laugh while the car window ascends, while it shuts them out.

|

She takes a long time, picking out the new name. 

She was Natasha for SHIELD, Natalie for Stark, Natalia at school, коренастый to her ballet teacher, Ната for her _babushka_ , on and on. She can’t even hold onto them all, now – sometimes she’ll be in a crowded place and someone will call out a name she doesn’t even remember using, _Nina_ , or _Nancy_ , and her head will turn of its own volition, her body answering before her brain can override.

And it’s more than that, more than names. She wasn’t lying to Steve when she said she could be anything he wanted, anything. There’s a roster she goes through, on long nights at her apartment, just for practice when she’s feeling rusty. A few months ago, she added Peggy in. She’d been getting better and better at the high English vowels, like plucking violin strings, like rolling sweet things in the mouth, cradling them. 

She can’t do anything about the curve of her cheek or the shape of her eyes, all wrong, but she’d idled in front of the mirror and talked to herself like a bird, imagined dialling Steve’s number, saying _hello, Captain. Everything’s okay_. 

She hadn’t been sure if it would be kindness or cruelty, and then Peggy had been alive, anyway. So.

|

The restaurant is run by a corpulent old Japanese man who frowns at her, sniffs disparagingly, says she can start on Monday, in the exact tone of voice that lets her know he expects her to last til Tuesday. But his eyes don’t linger on her legs or her breasts, and the place is a tiny hole-in-the-wall joint, absolutely perfect.

It’s hard work, tiring, sometimes dirty. She kneels in the back kitchen and scrubs beneath the industrial refrigerators, chases the odd stray from the back door with a broom. The owner grunts approvingly at her filthy knees and starts holding over portions of katsudon for her to eat on her breaks. 

“What can I getcha?” she asks each new family, eyes widened and bright, snapping a mouthful of gum. “Sure, hon, I know it looks a little scary right now, but just let me take you through the menu, there…”

The Southern accent is hokey, sure, but it’s fun, too. The wig is short, shaggy, dark brown, unshowy. Her uniform is a little flippy skirt and a rose-colored blouse with ruffles at the shoulders and waist. Her nametag reads _Nikki_ and her passport says she was born in Texas. 

After she’s been there a week, the delivery boy asks her out on a date. She goes. They eat French and Natasha spills her tea when she mistakes someone walking past the window for Steve.

|

She dials his number with shaking fingers, a month after she saw him last.

“Howdy,” she says when he answers, chirpy and bright, Nikki’s twang firmly in place. It’s eleven PM, and Natasha is walking around the block. Her apartment suddenly felt too small. As though a cold hand – unnaturally cold – was pressing on her sternum.

“Who is this?” Steve asks. “How did you get this number?”

|

The old woman who lives below Nikki has a Peke who yaps near-constantly, so Natasha tells herself that when she knocks on the door of 7B and offers to walk the thing a couple times a week she’s only doing it to give herself some peace. And strengthen her cover, of course. It won’t do any harm for her to have a sweet old biddy with gnarled hands in her back pocket, answering any queries with _oh, that Nikki who lives above me, she’s such a dear!_ It’s a dream for any vacationing international assassin.

Rudy isn’t nearly as obnoxious when he’s being allowed to prowl the neighborhood at night, making agonized faces at her when he accidentally steps a dainty paw on a slug in the darkness of the park. She laughs, she can’t help it. When a father and his three kids rush up and ask to pet her dog, she finds herself saying _sure, he’s nice, he won’t bite._

The harried father shoots her a grateful smile, taking the opportunity to get his breath back. Natasha makes the universal face for _kids, am I right?_ at him, like she has any idea at all.

|

Steve calls her back three days later, when she’s huddled in the trashy leopard-print bathroom of some divey club round the corner from work, waiting for Nikki’s colleague Martha to stop hurling.

“Who is this?” he asks. “I tried to find out, but I couldn’t trace the number.”

The phone’s a burner, of course. Nikki will have a new number next week. She’s so clumsy, you know, phone just slipped straight out of her hand while she was running a bath. Oops.

Natasha wonders if Steve even knows what a burner is, if he went to Stark about it.

“Everything’s okay, Captain,” she says. She rests her forehead against the cold mirror over the sink and closes her eyes, just for a second. She hopes she isn’t drunk enough that Nikki’s accent slipped. He doesn’t say anything, the seconds pulling long and sticky like stretched saltwater taffy. Natasha feels the words piling up against the dam of her teeth. Martha lets out a long, heartfelt groan from the cubicle.

“Get some sleep, Captain,” she says, and hangs up.

|

She holds on to that burner longer than she’s supposed to. Steve calls when she’s in the middle of a crowded dancefloor the Saturday after, a lime green and probably poisonous drink clutched in one hand. Nikki’s twenty-three, and acts like it.

She answers the call but just holds her phone aloft, catching the thumping from the speakers, the sweaty hungry roar of everyone around her, all looking for something in the dark.

|

Steve’s address changes. It doesn’t surprise Natasha that he gives up the place where Fury staggered to him, winded and wounded, but it does surprise her how easily she works out where the new place is.

She doesn’t lurk in his bushes or anything weird like that. She walks Rudy down his block a couple times a week, that’s all. One time she sees the silhouette of his back through his filmy curtains, another time she hears a sweet old song playing through an open window, the words too hushed for her to hear.

|

The delivery boy’s ashing his cigarette on the back step next to her at work on a Wednesday, the night unusually warm and balmy. Nikki hugs her knees to her chest anyway, pulls her skirt down over the bruises just on the bone.

“I’m saving for a new car,” he tells her, eyes bright, animated. “There’s this little beauty at my friend’s shop, he’s restoring her for me, a little more every month.”

The smoke from his cigarette arcs in the air as he waves his hands. She smiles with the left half of her mouth. 

“That’s cool,” she says. She thinks he might be twenty, twenty-one. If Nikki was ever going to get married, Natasha feels sure it would be to someone like him. Earnest, sweet, a little bumbling. 

“What about you?” he asks, stubbing the light out. “You’re not gonna stay here forever, right? Smart girl like you?”

A part of Natasha is tickled at being called ‘girl’ by this kid, when she’s nearly thirty and he’s still got that teenage ungainliness to his limbs. The hour and a half she spends at her makeup mirror in the morning, blending the years and the countries and the missions away, must be well spent after all.

“I want to go to school eventually,” she says. At their backs, the kitchen belches out steam as the door swings open, closed, open. Natasha expects to see her hair curling up at her cheek, but of course, it’s a wig. “For deaf education.”

She can’t remember whether that was a lie she cultivated as Natalie, as Nikita, as Nadya. She remembers a kid who lived next door to her _babushka_ , with pale blond hair and blue-framed glasses that were always being patched up. She remembers him holding her hands in his, stroking over the backs of them, then signing slow, so slow, so her pudgy baby hands could copy.

She thinks she remembers, anyway. The memories have a lemony, filtered, unreal quality, like old home movies.

“Wow,” he says, his whole face lighting up. He has a dimple in his left cheek. “That’s amazing! So you can sign? Can you show me something?”

“Sure,” she says. She knows the alphabet in ASL, can’t remember when she learned or why. 

“What are you saying?” he asks, frowning over her hands. It feels strange to be so much the target of his attention, the attention of someone who’s just some kid in a restaurant somewhere, a kid who doesn’t know who she is, what she’s done, what she _could_ do. It’s been so long.

“My name,” she says. “My real name.”

“What is it?” he asks. His hands are already twitching with the urge to learn, to copy her. All of a sudden the step feels cold and rough underneath her.

“Nicole,” she says. She looks away. “It’s Nicole.”

|

She still hasn’t got rid of that old burner, so she supposes she’s only got herself to blame.

“Natasha,” Steve says, as soon as she picks up. “I know it’s you, Natasha.”

She isn’t sure if it really took him this long to figure it out or if he just got tired of being coy.

“I can’t talk right now, I’m in the middle of a shift,” she says. She scribbles something on a scrap of paper and smiles brightly at the couple she’s just sat at the little table by the window, pretending she’s taking a delivery order and she’ll be over in a second.

“Natasha,” he sighs. She can picture him sitting in an overstuffed armchair in his apartment, kneading his forehead. “Where are you?”

“I’m never far away, Cap,” she says, softly. The accent crumbles and fades away, her voice falling to its usual pitch. Her knuckles are white on the phone.

“Natasha,” he says, rasping a little like his throat is dry, “it’s okay to need a friend, you know. Would it be – be so bad?”

She swallows, winded. There’s nothing but his breath on the line for a few long, slow seconds, and then someone upends a tray of cutlery on the other side of the pass, and she jumps, swearing softly.

“I have to go, they need me,” she says. It’s not what she means, at all. She means _this won’t last forever, just let me have now_. She means that when she was little, she played at being invisible, not at weddings or teaparties. 

Maybe he knows.

|

She serves Sam dinner a week later. The brown contacts sting like they haven’t in weeks, but she looks straight into his eyes as she hands him the menu, not conceding anything. She actually thinks for a second she’s managed to brazen it out, that he’s been fooled by the smokescreen of wig-blush-eyelashes-accent, the way Nikki holds herself differently to Natasha, four inches shorter in her clumpy waitress-shoes than Natasha usually allows herself to be. Her mannerisms are chaotic and bubbly, her chatter unceasing, the accent dialled to eleven. She gives no sign she recognizes him at all.

He doesn’t, either, until she sees the note he’s left with her tip. _I won’t tell. Stay safe, чёрная._ чёрная. _Black_. The Cyrillic is shaky but unmistakeable. She thinks maybe she should be unnerved by the idea that Sam, at least, is watching her – but really, isn’t that what she wanted? To walk past Steve’s one night and, through the window, see him looking back at her?

|

Nobody wants to live on holiday forever, is the thing. It’s human nature to desire the things that, in the end, will be worst for you - and so a life of golden sand and jewelled, winking seas may tempt for a minute. Just a minute. A day, a fraction - but only that. She was tempted, she won’t lie, but Sam’s note burns in her pocket like a talisman, a beacon calling her on. Nothing lasts forever. Natasha thinks the opposite would be terrifying, anyway.

“I’ll miss you, Chef Kinoshita,” Natasha tells him in the back kitchen, the day she hands in her resignation. He pushes a tower of plastic containers into her arms, tied together with an enormous knotted handkerchief, and sighs. His eyes flicker mournfully to the brown sludge that already seems to be recollecting under the industrial fridges.

She deliberately picked a day Paul wasn’t working. She wants to pickle in her mind the image of him on the back step that night, smoking and telling her about his car, his hands with the scar across the left index knuckle hesitantly spelling her name. 

She walks out onto the street in her uniform and nametag and turns right, following the breeze. A hundred feet ahead of her, a little girl out walking with her family trips over a loose section of sidewalk, and falls. When her parents crowd her, dismayed, she only laughs, like someone pulled a rug from under her feet, performing a magic trick.

He’s running in the park like she knew he would be. She settles on a bench, pulls her book from her bag – Anna Karenina, because just because she’s not on holiday anymore doesn’t mean she has to completely stop having fun – and waits.

He notices her on the third circuit, but doesn’t stop. He simply glances over at her and slows maybe a fraction of a second, almost infinitesimal, before going on. She has the urge to pull her wig off, feel the breeze over her scalp for the first time in weeks.

It’s the tenth circuit before he stops. The tension, the waiting, is a sweet agony. When he ducks his head into the cone of light haloing her, his eyes are bright and knowing, the wry little twist of his mouth so familiar. He isn’t nearly as good an actor as Sam.

“Hi there, I don’t believe we’ve met,” he says.

_Would it really be so – so bad? To need a friend?_

Yes. Yes – it is. It’s terrible, so terrible, to need anything. Natasha raises her eyes, green and unclouded, her contacts left in a trashcan a few feet from the restaurant. It feels as though there are several small flying things trapped in her chest, struggling to get free.

“No,” she says, voice low. A smile curls her mouth, unbidden. “I don’t think we have.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've only seen the movie once, so if I made any mistakes, please feel free to point them out!


End file.
